cruddy

These are banal occurrences such as a car breaking down, a lost washing machine lid, or the everyday cruddiness of enervating environments unfit for living that occur beneath the threshold of eventfulness--that is, they do not register as 'spectacular forms of death that capture and rivet the imagination of late liberal societies' (Povinelli, 2011a: 146).

The figures have been collaged onto the canvas, then overpainted to veil their specificity; the source material is, as Drexler herself once said, "hidden but present, like a disturbing memory." The resulting jerry-built, cobbled-together look--and a repertoire of images that highlights crime, violence, and sexual conflict--serves as a reminder that what might once have looked like glossy, airbrushed promises of happiness are shadowed by a film-noir sense of doom and a disillusioned eye for the culture's underlying cruddiness. Warhol showed Marilyn Monroe as an eternal icon, tragic yet ever-perfect; Drexler gives us a Marilyn Pursued by Death, 1963, its two black-and-white figures outlined in red in motion on a black field.

Prince's pictures are, of course, rephotographs; the cruddiness of the original reproduction magnified by their re-reproduction.